Goal of Presenting: Differentiate or Die

March 31, 2009

Yes­ter­day, I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to hear Yousef Kha­li­di from Microsoft talk about Azure. I think the pre­sen­ta­tion was weak, though I real­ly appre­ci­at­ed the long and hon­est QA at the end of the ses­sion, and wish more pre­sen­ters had made time for one.

In par­tic­u­lar Yousef missed a great oppor­tu­ni­ty to edu­cate and dif­fer­en­ti­ate. By cre­at­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion that was at least 90% either pub­licly avail­able infor­ma­tion on his prod­uct or estab­lished infor­ma­tion about cloud com­put­ing, his ses­sion added very lit­tle val­ue and left peo­ple want­i­ng more. This feel­ing was appar­ent in the both the con­tent and tone of the ques­tions he received.

3 things jumped out at me that we can all learn from, and it all boiled down to the thing every tech­nol­o­gy pre­sen­ter needs to under­stand:

Dif­fer­en­ti­ate or Die

Yousef’s intro­duc­tion to Azure could have eas­i­ly been the intro­duc­tion for any of a dozen dif­fer­ent cloud prod­ucts. He talked about the same dri­vers and the same fea­tures as every­one else. When sell­ing soft­ware, we don’t often see our competitor’s pre­sen­ta­tions. At a con­fer­ence, watch­ing ven­dor pre­sen­ta­tions back-to-back, the over­lap becomes high­ly appar­ent. Those with­out over­lap stand out bright­ly.

He paused at one point… and called out a bul­let that said “scale out vs scale up” (or, was it “scale up vs scale out?”). He made a big deal about call­ing this out, and explain­ing how Microsoft did one, not the oth­er. But, for the life of me, he nev­er explained what they were, why they were impor­tant, or how Microsoft’s solu­tion was designed unique­ly to do one or the oth­er. A missed oppor­tu­ni­ty to dif­fer­en­ti­ate in his pre­sen­ta­tion.

And, that’s what the audi­ence want­ed. You see, right before the end of the QA ses­sion, one very astute ques­tion­er asked:

“How do you dif­fer­en­ti­ate Azure from Ama­zon Web Ser­vices?”

Had I been the pre­sen­ter, I would have hugged this guy at the end of the pre­sen­ta­tion. What a great ques­tion to end on.

Yousef fum­bled. He respond­ed “I don’t like to talk about my com­peti­tors, let me tell you about my prod­uct.” (That’s pret­ty much ver­ba­tim.)

It’s the right thing to do, not talk­ing about your com­peti­tors direct­ly. But, he should have respond­ed by say­ing “I don’t want to speak for Ama­zon, but here’s what you need to know about cloud com­put­ing, and here are our dif­fer­en­tia­tors…” Frame the prob­lem to your advan­tage, and explain why it’s impor­tant to frame it that way. Help peo­ple under­stand why your prod­uct is dif­fer­ent. That’s the goal of the pre­sen­ter.

And, for any­one who thinks it’s “tricky” to “frame the prob­lem to a vendor’s advan­tage” — look at it this way. A vendor’s cre­at­ed a prod­uct that they BELIEVE is bet­ter, because they’ve approached the prob­lem from that per­spec­tive. It’s up to buy­ers to judge the val­ue of that dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion.

David

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If you look at Yousef’s cre­den­tials, they’re great… as an engi­neer. But, it speaks to my point that know­ing about the prod­uct does NOT nec­es­sar­i­ly mean you know how to sell it. There­fore, peo­ple must be trained to sell/position it. Also, some­how we must find a way to eval­u­ate posi­tion­ing skills in tech­nol­o­gy pre­sen­ters sep­a­rate­ly from their hands-on engi­neer­ing skills.

If I were a sales guy, and my tech­ni­cal side­kick said a com­peti­tor were way ahead of me, it’d be the last time I took him on a call.